An enquiry into the strange and mysterious death of a Brazilian composer. Imagined as a novel-opera, Rosa brings the reader into a new relation with narrative through the visual and aural qualities of language, creating a kind of mental opera: staged by Greenaway, but one in which the reader has to make the music. The story deals with the violent assassinations of composers over the course of the twentieth century, and the enquiry here concerns the death of J.-M. de Rosa, a Brazilian who found success in the nineteen-fifties writing music for westerns.